Lavabit owner fears arrest for non-compliance after secret surveillance order

The owner of the encrypted email service used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden says he could face criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret federal court order issued last week.

Ladar Levison abruptly shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, last
week to avoid being forced to hand over customers’ personal
information and communications.

James Trump, a senior litigation counsel at the US attorney’s
office in Alexandria, Virginia, contacted Levinson’s lawyer on
August 8 - the day Levinson ended Lavabit’s services, NBC News
reported. The attorney was told that Levison had “violated the court order,” leading
to speculation that he may be charged with contempt of court.

“I would love to tell you
everything that’s happened to me over the last six weeks. I’m
just legally prevented from doing so,” Levison recently
told RT. He is legally barred from speaking publicly about the
legal order, which is believed to be a sealed subpoena or
national security letter which demands that he cooperate with an
investigation related to Snowden.

In a note to customers and supporters upon shutting down Lavabit,
Levison wrote on the company’s website, “I have been forced to make a difficult
decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American
people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by
shutting down Lavabit.”

Levison plans to challenge the secret order in a federal appeals
court. He told NBC that he has been “threatened with arrest multiple times over
the past six weeks.”

He stated that he has complied with court orders for information
on targeted customers in the past, but insists the latest order
is vastly different in scope and scale.

“I think the amount of
information that they’re collecting on people that they have no
right to collect information on is the most alarming
thing,” he told RT. “I
mean, the Fourth Amendment is supposed to guarantee that our
government will only conduct surveillance on people in which it
has a probable suspicion or evidence that they are committing
some crime, and that that evidence has been reviewed by a judge
and signed off by a judge before that surveillance begins. And if
there’s anything alarming, it’s that now that’s all being done
after the fact. Everything’s being recorded, and then a judge can
after the fact say it’s okay to go look at the
information.”

Following Levison’s move to shutter Lavabit, encrypted internet
service provider Silent Circle has followed suit. Other
encryption services have suggested that they would do the same if
put in a similar position by the US government.

Riseup email service issued a statement saying, “We would rather pull the plug than submit
to repressive surveillance by our government, or any
government.”

Encrypted chat client Cryptocat stated, “If we receive a surveillance or backdoor
order that we are unable to legally fight, we will shut down
Cryptocat rather than implement it.”

Levison began a legal defense fund which raised over $40,000
within hours of Lavabit’s shutdown. That number had jumped to
$100,000 by the next day, Levison told RT.